Exhibit Hall - Left @ IRCE 2009

Last week, I was at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition (IRCE) in Boston from June 15 through 18. It was a well organized show but for the far flung conference rooms, which made those who wanted to cherry pick the general sessions run around a lot. The food was OK. The networking party sponsored by Alibaba.com was great especially the card tricks (poker) that a young local magician performed at our table. Look, I have seen my share of these before but I got to tell you that this one was mesmerizing.

The conference sessions covered a wide variety of topics and the speakers, for the most part, were good. The exhibitors, more than 300 of them, ranged from search engine companies to e-commerce solution providers to fulfillment houses. The attendees represented wide ranging geographies - from those local to Boston to California on the west coast, to Australia, New Zealand, and India. 

There were 4 full-day workshops on Monday and Thursday covering Email, Search, Mobile Marketing, and Small Retailers. The general sessions, with number of tracks, were on Tuesday, Wednesday and covered wide ranging topics.

Exhibit Hall - Middle @ IRCE 2009

I did observe few recurring themes during the conference and this is keeping in perspective of the needs of small and medium sized online retailers:

1. Everyone was well aware of Search Marketing - be it PPC (pay-per-click) or SEO (Search engine optimization) and most attendees have been using search in some way to attract traffic to their sites.
2. Most attendees were aware of Email marketing but a majority of the attendees did not know how to strategically use email marketing to their advantage.
3. I did not attend the mobile marketing workshop but did hear that some medium sized businesses were interested to understand the tactical component of using mobile marketing in addition to their other marketing channels.
4. There was a lot of interest to learn how to optimize an online retailer’s website to increase conversion.
5. There was also a lot of interest in analytics, performance metrics, and optimization in general.
6. Everyone across the board was impacted during the last 12+ months due to state of the US economy - as if this is new news, hello?
7. There was neither much focus nor serious interest in utilizing social networks as an additional marketing channel for the online retailers - yet!
8. The challenges catalog marketers are facing…
9. The innumerable number of moving parts associated with running an online retail business - everything from technology, operations, financial, logistics, marketing, traffic, conversions, partnerships, and more.     
   

   Exhibit Hall - Right @ IRCE 2009

There were also some highlights that I think deserve coverage. I will share these in the next post.